Mr. Murder

For as long as Charlotte could remember, her parents had been having jokey conversations about his driving, though her mother was serious about wanting him to go slower.

“I’ve never even had a parking ticket,” Daddy said.

“Well, of course, it’s not easy to get a parking ticket when the speedometer needle is always pegged out.”

In the past their back-and-forth had always been good-humored. But now, he suddenly spoke sharply to Mom: “For God’s sake, Paige, I’m a good driver, this is a safe car, I spent more money on it than I should have precisely because it’s one of the safest cars on the road, so will you just give this a rest?”

“Sure. Sorry,” Mom said.

Charlotte looked at her sister. Em was wide-eyed with disbelief.

Daddy was not Daddy. Something was wrong. Big-time wrong.

They had gone only a block before he slowed down and glanced at Mom and said, “Sorry.”

“No, you were right, I’m too much of a worrier about some things,” Mom told him.

They smiled at each other. It was all right. They weren’t going to get divorced like those people they’d been talking about at dinner. Charlotte couldn’t recall them ever being angry with each other for longer than a few minutes.

However, she was still worried. Maybe she should check around the house and outside behind the garage to see if she could find a giant empty seed pod from outer space.

4

Like a shark cruising cold currents in a night sea, the killer drives.

This is his first time in Kansas City, but he knows the streets. Total mastery of the layout is part of his preparation for every assignment, in case he becomes the subject of a police pursuit and needs to make a hasty escape under pressure.

Curiously, he has no recollection of having seen—let alone studied—a map, and he can’t imagine from where this highly detailed information was acquired. But he doesn’t like to consider the holes in his memory because thinking about them opens the door on a black abyss that terrifies him.

So he just drives.

Usually he likes to drive. Having a powerful and responsive machine at his command gives him a sense of control and purpose.

But once in a while, as happens now, the motion of the car and the sights of a strange city—regardless of how familiar he may be with the layout of its streets—make him feel small, alone, adrift. His heart begins to beat fast. His palms are suddenly so damp, the steering wheel slips through them.

Then, as he brakes at a traffic light, he looks at the car in the lane beside him and sees a family revealed by the street lamps. The father is driving. The mother sits in the passenger seat, an attractive woman. A boy of about ten and a girl of six or seven are in the back seat. On their way home from a night out. Maybe a movie. Talking, laughing, parents and children together, sharing.

In his deteriorating condition, that sight is a merciless hammer blow, and he makes a thin wordless sound of anguish.

He pulls off the street, into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant. Slumps in his seat. Breathes in quick shallow gasps.

The emptiness. He dreads the emptiness.

And now it is upon him.

He feels as if he is a hollow man, made of the thinnest blown glass, fragile, only slightly more substantial than a ghost.

At times like this, he desperately needs a mirror. His reflection is one of the few things that can confirm his existence.

The restaurant’s elaborate red and green neon sign illuminates the interior of the Ford. When he tilts the rearview mirror to look at himself, his skin has a cadaverous cast, and his eyes are alight with changing crimson shapes, as if fires burn within him.

Tonight, his reflection is not enough to diminish his agitation. He feels less substantial by the moment. Perhaps he will breathe out one last time, expelling the final thin substance of himself in that exhalation.

Tears blur his vision. He is overwhelmed by his loneliness, and tortured by the meaninglessness of his life.

He folds his arms across his chest, hugs himself, leans forward, and rests his forehead against the steering wheel. He sobs as if he is a small child.

He doesn’t know his name, only the names he will use while in Kansas City. He wants so much to have a name of his own that is not as counterfeit as the credit cards on which it appears. He has no family, no friends, no home. He cannot recall who gave him this assignment—or any of the jobs before it—and he doesn’t know why his targets must die. Incredibly, he has no idea who pays him, does not remember where he got the money in his wallet or where he bought the clothes he wears.

On a more profound level, he does not know who he is. He has no memory of a time when his profession was anything other than murder. He has no politics, no religion, no personal philosophy whatsoever. Whenever he tries to take an interest in current affairs, he finds himself unable to retain what he reads in the newspapers; he can’t even focus his attention on television news. He is intelligent, yet he permits himself—or is permitted—only satisfactions of a physical nature: food, sex, the savage exhilaration of homicide. Vast regions of his mind remain uncharted.

A few minutes pass in green and red neon.

His tears dry. Gradually he stops trembling.

He will be all right. Back on the rails. Steady, controlled.

In fact he ascends with remarkable speed from the depths of despair. Surprising, how readily he is willing to continue with his latest assignment—and with the mere shadow of a life that he leads. Sometimes it seems to him that he operates as if programmed in the manner of a dumb and obedient machine.

On the other hand, if he were not to continue, what else would he do? This shadow of a life is the only life he has.

5

While the girls were upstairs, brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, Marty methodically went from room to room on the first floor, making sure all of the doors and windows were locked.

He had circled half the downstairs—and was testing the latch on the window above the kitchen sink—before he realized what a peculiar task he had set for himself. Prior to turning in every night, he checked the front and back doors, of course, plus the sliding doors between the family room and patio, but he did not ordinarily verify that any particular window was secure unless he knew that it had been open for ventilation during the day. Nevertheless, he was confirming the integrity of the house perimeter as conscientiously as a sentry might certify the outer defenses of a fortress besieged by enemies.

As he was finishing in the kitchen, he heard Paige enter, and a moment later she slid both arms around his waist, embracing him from behind. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, well . . .”

“Bad day?”

“Not really. Just one bad moment.”

Marty turned in her arms to embrace her. She felt wonderful, so warm and strong, so alive.

That he loved her more now than when they had met in college was no surprise. The triumphs and failures they had shared, the years of daily struggle to make a place in the world and to seek the meaning of it, was rich soil in which love could grow.

However, in an age when ideal beauty was supposedly embodied in nineteen-year-old professional cheerleaders for major-league football teams, Marty knew a lot of guys who would be surprised to hear he’d found